Some AMAZING tricks of WINDOWS 10 (Part 3)

One of the more common tweaks made to the Windows 10 taskbar involve changing it from always visible to auto-hidden, that way you can free up more screen space and only use the taskbar when you need it (it’ll show up when you hover your mouse over it).

But if you’re on Windows 10, there’s a rare and frustrating issue that may pop up when you use an auto-hidden taskbar: sometimes the auto-hide functionality will stop working for no reason, usually when some app enters fullscreen mode.

If this is happening to you, there are a few solutions you can try.

Method 1: In Windows 10, the taskbar stops auto-hiding when an app needs your attention. Maybe you have unread messages in Skype, or maybe one of your downloads in Firefox finished, or perhaps your Postbox app ran into an error. Cycle through and make sure you have no new alerts!

Method 2: Open the Task Manager (there are many ways to do this) and navigate to the Processes tab, then find the process called Windows Explorer. Click on it, then click on the button labeled Restart. If the taskbar was temporarily glitched, this should fix it.

Method 3: If the taskbar is still being wonky, try unpinning all of your taskbar items before repinning them. It won’t always work, but you’d be surprised how often it does. I’m not really sure why it works, but it’s easy and harmless enough that you might as well try it.

We’ve covered solutions for other Windows 10 taskbar issues, so if you run into any other problems, check out that post first.

How to Set a Custom Color for Taskbar and Title Bar in Windows 10

You probably know this already, but Windows 10 can be quite frustrating. Mixed in with all of the features and additions that we love, Windows 10 is also littered with numerous bugs and issues as well as a handful of limitations that we find annoying.

One particular limitation has been the lack of customization options. Remember how much you could tweak the look and feel of Windows XP and Windows 7? Windows 10 is primitive in comparison, but fortunately it seems that Microsoft is slowly putting some of that power back into the hands of users.

For example, now you can set the color of the taskbar and the title bar (known as the “accent color”) to a custom value instead of being forced to pick one of the 48 preset colors.

Before the Creators Update

If you are on Version 14997 or earlier of Windows 10, you can only set a custom accent color through Control Panel:

Open the Run box with Windows + R.
Type in control color and click OK.
Click on Show color mixer to get advanced color picking.
Use the sliders to find the color you want. Unfortunately you can’t enter values directly, but you can always use a tool like HSLPicker to convert from HEX or RGB to HSL and approximate the values on the sliders.
Click Apply.
After the Creators Update

If you’re on any version of Windows 10 after the Anniversary Update, it’s much easier. No longer do you need the Control Panel as you can do it right from the Settings app.

Open the Start Menu and launch Settings.
Navigate to Personalization > Colors.
Click Custom color.
Use the color picker to find the color you want. You can also click on More to open up RGB options if the color picker isn’t working well for you.
Click Done.